I have accepted InOBU's apology in an off-Mudcat e-mail. I only visit this site once a day, sometimes not as often, so I did not see it until about 7:30 p.m. on Friday.

Whistle Stop's explanation of executive orders, set forth above, was pretty accurate. To directly answer the question asked, however, it should be noted that Executive Orders may be issued by the President at any time without approval or review from any other authority. They stand either until the same or another President issues an order "repealing" the old order or until a Court declares that the particular order is unconstitutional because it exceeds the power of the Executive or for some other reason (and the President's people either decide not to take an appeal or exhaust their appeals).

I use the Esq. after my name because that has become the traditional designation of attorney status in this country. I only use it on Mudcat when I am posting on a legal subject so that readers will know that I am licensed in the field. I really do not care much for it, but it is a helpful shorthand.

Government concerns over secrecy are usually over-valued. An attorney who shares my office suite recently litigated a major "secret evidence" case involving a Palestinian immigrant. As is often the case, the "secret evidence" turned out to be nothing of any worth, simply a set of unsubstantiated and uncorroborated allegations made by his former wife. Once the "secret evidence" lost its secrecy cachet, it quickly became apparent that it proved nothing. The Government claimed that it wanted to protect its informants, when in fact it was covering up its unfair prosecution of a racially profiled immigrant. It was all a bit like the Emperor's New Clothes, except my colleague's client had to spend a long time sitting in jail.

Our government manages to prosecute all sorts of bad people and still permit those defendants to confront the witnesses against them. Consider prosecutions of organized crime including, in New Jersey, several mobs accused of running murderous operations. In the present emergency the government's veil of secrecy seems to be more designed to prevent us all from realizing how little they have been able to learn and how shallow their work has been in identifying the truly dangerous than it is to protect secret methods of investigation that work. The government should be more concerned about hiring good investigators who speak arabic or pashtun and who know something about international culture and worry less about covering up its failures. If a particular prosecution is so important that a hitherto secret agent needs to be revealed than that spy should be brought in from the cold and replaced with someone else. If it is not important enough to do that, then perhaps we just have to accept that some criminals will go free. It will hardly be the first time that the government has forgiven some crimes because in its view some other governmental purpose is more important than that particular conviction. Think of criminal informants, some of whom have been murderers. Think of Werner von Braun and other nazis that our government protected from prosecution.

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to let a few guilty people get away with their crimes over ensnaring thousands of people that the authorities in their wisdom view as suspicious in a web of secrecy that is only tested in a secret trial. Due Process and Jury Trials are worth the cost of taking some because they beat the alternative.

I believe Winston Churchill once commented that anglo-american law and government created a terrible system in every way, except when compared to the various alternatives.

-Bennet D. Zurofsky, Esq.